


our victory, we’ll sing forever

by sulfate



Series: what you've always longed for [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Ambient Blue Lions Childhood Quartet Emotions, Ambiguous Relationships, F/M, Felix and Ingrid's Mercenary Roadtrip of Relinquished Ideals, Injury, Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-Canon, Sharing a Bed, Sparring, wound care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:34:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22049443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sulfate/pseuds/sulfate
Summary: When they fought together it was like for the moment they were inhabiting their former selves again.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Ingrid Brandl Galatea
Series: what you've always longed for [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1587088
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65





	our victory, we’ll sing forever

**Author's Note:**

> how fucked up is it that in both of felixgrid's paired endings one of them gives up the thing most fundamental to their sense of self for the other's sake... anyway here's 4k of ingrid feelings masquerading as a shipfic, though the ship part of that is a little, uh. in the eye of the beholder. in this fic ingrid/felix/sylvain were recruited to the black eagles. setting this free right before the turn of the decade, i hope you enjoy!!

I have to act  
as though there is actually  
a map to that place:

_ when you were a child— _

— _Blue Rotunda_ , Louise Glück

By the end of the first week on the road, Ingrid’s patience had well and truly frayed to a thread. Felix was in every way the most disagreeable travelling companion she’d ever had the displeasure of experiencing, and that was including Felix himself, when their families had ridden to Fhirdiad together for Dimitri’s seventh birthday. He’d sulked the whole way, complaining that Glenn was spending all his time talking to Ingrid and not _him._

Unimpressed, Ingrid had said, _You already get to talk to Glenn every day, I don’t see the problem._

Felix had spluttered and spent the rest of the ride ignoring her, mollified only when they met House Gautier just before the castle gates and he could latch onto Sylvain. Nearly two decades on and he still thought silent treatment was a viable strategy. No matter. Ingrid decided that stony silence suited her just fine. She placed a steadying hand to the side of her horse’s neck, almost as much to comfort herself as her steed. 

He kept up the silence all the way through the next town, the clack of horseshoe against cobblestone their loudest companion, and left it to Ingrid to settle the night’s lodgings at a local inn: a narrow room with a single bed. Watch duty aside, wherever possible they slept in the same bedroll because it was the practical thing to do. There was the obvious economic benefit, and heat conservation was vital in these northern nights; she’d shared sleeping space with countless peers back during the war. Even with Felix, though they’d always had a large redheaded buffer between them and it was the absence of Sylvain now that stymied her. She and Felix, they didn’t do well without another person there to deflect, direct. Five dwindling to four, to three, to two. Something was about to unstopper itself in her throat. Suddenly, as though it were the first time, she was claustrophobically aware of Felix’s body lying half a handspan’s width away from hers. 

Then Felix’s hand curved over the back of her neck, heavy and warm, bridging the distance. The gesture was so like Sylvain that Ingrid nearly flinched. “Go to sleep,” Felix said. These were possibly the first words he’d spoken to her all day.

Ingrid considered telling him exactly where he could shove his advice. She settled on a tersely noncombative, “You should too.” Felix did not bother to grace this with a reply.

Dawn came, the beginning of the second week of her new life. They kept moving towards the next town, which was larger and more likely to hold prospective employers. The road narrowed; wordlessly, they fell into single file. Felix’s back was a plane of dark blue in the morning sunlight. Like this it was easier to remember why she’d chosen to leave everything behind and come with him.

She hadn’t wanted to be alone. More than that, she hadn’t wanted him to be alone. She’d followed him into worse, after all.

A sour feeling turned itself over in her stomach. She urged her horse on.

When they fought together it was like for the moment they were inhabiting their former selves again. Here at last was something they didn’t need to be able to speak to one another in order to do. This language they were both fluent in, at the expense of nearly everything else. Ingrid parried a blow and with the inevitability of water assuming the shape of its vessel Felix’s sword flashed to block her unprotected side. Everywhere she needed him to be, there he was. In combat they were two limbs of the same animal. 

It was a simple job. Rout a party of bandits, half the money upfront, half the money upon successful completion. Mercenary work was surprisingly in demand, even in peacetime. Ingrid swung her sword in a narrow arc. She missed Lúin, its familiar and lively heft in her palm. She’d never been half as good with swords as she had been with lances, but swords were both common and anonymous and Lúin certainly was neither of those things.

Ingrid drove her sword right through the last bandit’s windpipe, freed it again with a twist of her wrist. Blood sprayed out, and she must have miscalculated the angle of the blow, intended to keep herself clean; warmth splattered against the gauntlet she raised to shield her face.

She held it together all the way until they were back in their lodgings, another night paid for with their newly acquired coin. She shucked off her lightweight chainmail, her gauntlets, the only parts of her armour she’d brought with her. She needed to clean and polish them. This wasn’t usually a chore she dreaded, but tonight it seemed insurmountable. 

She’d killed many people, including some she had once considered friends. That was a necessary side effect of war. But she’d had a cause, then. Something to throw her heart behind, an oath to keep, a vision to realise, and everything else could fall to the wayside. She needed it, somebody else’s shining dream that she could cut open a path towards; it was what she’d been born for. And now Edelgard sat enthroned in Enbarr, and Ingrid was murdering civilians for pay. Criminals, but civilians nonetheless. Her blade sliding home through that man’s throat, a sight she’d seen countless times but never in this context, this unjustifiable, unforgivable line of work she’d chosen. 

Nausea seized her. For a moment she thought she would actually be sick, the way she’d never been at the sight of viscera. She put a hand to her mouth, beating back the rush of heat to her face. 

“Can’t take the blood?” Felix said tonelessly, wiping down his sword with a rag. “I should have known. You don’t have it in you to—”

The last thread snapped. “Shut up! Don’t ever say that to me again!” Ingrid snarled, more harshly than she’d intended, and Felix’s eyes went wide. That wasn’t true. She had intended it. She’d always prided herself on her honesty to herself, _a knight must be true_ —but of course, she wasn’t a knight anymore. Unsworn, untitled. She’d given it all up.

The world was trembling; or no, she realised, it was only her. Once again she had overestimated the place she occupied in it. When would the lesson take? What would it take for her to understand at last that the care she kept trying to extend was only a burden once received? But it was a cut that wouldn’t scar over, the blood there welling up at the slightest press, thumb to the tender underside of her heart, like it always had been. Felix crying over a skinned knee, back when they’d been children together and he hadn’t known to be afraid to expose his vulnerabilities. Felix watching her now with eyes like flint, and she couldn’t help searching for that boy she’d once known in them, some instinctive quest for familiarity. 

She would always look for Felix. This was an extremely miserable realisation to have.

“All my life,” she said. “All my life I have striven to be the best knight I could be. You know it isn’t the _blood._ I know I chose this and I have no right to complain, but you should understand exactly what it means for me to—to take up this path. Call it weakness, disdain me for it all you want, but at least I’m not a coward and a liar!”

She braced herself for her words to be thrown back in her face, but Felix only looked stricken, like he hadn’t thought about it at all. Why would he have turned his mind to it? He’d certainly never afforded that much consideration to her before. “I didn’t—”

“You didn’t ask me to come with you? You think I don’t know that?” Distantly she was proud of herself for keeping her voice steady. “You think I don’t know you never wanted me around, or—you never wanted to confront what it would mean for me to be around—” 

“That’s not what I—”

“I'm not done!” she said. Pulse hot and wild in her ears like a southern summer storm. “It wasn’t like you were unkind to everyone. You were kind to Annette, you were kind to Ashe, even—Bernadetta. Lysithea. What was it about—we stood by your side all our lives, me, Sylvain, His High—” She cut herself off, furious. “ _Dimitri_ , the three of us, and you never—” She could hear the tears thickening her voice but her eyes stayed dry. “Why was it that you could face them but not us?” 

She’d sliced herself loose from every unshakeable pillar her life had rested upon before, every ideal she’d tried to wrest solace out of during the long, sleepless nights of the war. These days nobody bore the weight of her weapon but herself. If she couldn’t learn to live with even that, then she was a failure of a swordswoman. 

The sour, roiling feeling in her stomach returned with a vengeance. In Edelgard’s service she had at least fought for what she believed in. She didn’t know what she believed in now. 

Felix had his eyes screwed shut, like he couldn’t bear to look at her. Some of that old openness back in his face, that glass-hearted boy of her childhood. “Because you knew me,” Felix said roughly. 

“What kind of answer is that,” Ingrid said.

“You don’t understand,” Felix said. Everything they said to one another was only an echo of an earlier conversation. There must have been an origin point, some time when they were new to each other and spoke wholeheartedly, but try as she might Ingrid could not recall it. “If you did, you wouldn’t have come with me.”

Somehow, Ingrid managed to haul Felix into the inn room in one piece, keeping him upright with an arm around his waist and a formidable force of will. She deposited him on the bed, where he appeared to keel over, unconscious, but Ingrid could see the uneven waver of his chest. He had a hand clamped rigidly over his shoulder. 

“Let me see,” Ingrid demanded. Without waiting for Felix’s answer, she pried his fingers off, sliced the soaked fabric there away to reveal the skin underneath, split open from the tip of the shoulder to partway down his upper arm. The gash stark and sticky with blood, glistening in the low light. 

“What were you _thinking_?” she hissed. “Taking a hit like that with your sword arm, you weren’t even this reckless when we were children—you’ll be out of commission for weeks.” 

Predictably, he did not respond. Felix had a death wish likely visible from Almyra. And here she’d decided to yoke her life and livelihood to his. Ingrid did not have a death wish, as far as she could tell, unless this counted as one. She had been prepared for death for most of her life, but she did not welcome it, because she saw value in what she could offer. As long as she could wield a weapon, she was useful.

Useless: the familiar, sullen downturn to Felix’s mouth as she cleaned out the wound. It was deep but not messy, an incision from a sharp blade, no barrier to the healing process. Which would have to be natural; she didn’t know how to accelerate it, nor did she have any vulneraries on hand. What wouldn’t she give to have Linhardt with her. Or, reaching further back, Mercedes. 

“I’m going to have to stitch it shut,” she warned him.

“Just do it,” he gritted out, face bloodless.

Ingrid had never been one for embroidery, but she knew how to darn. When famine struck Galatea, their economic resources had dwindled rapidly and they’d had no choice but to mend clothing wherever it tore, Ingrid’s stitches a little untidy but serviceable. She fished out a sewing kit and a roll of gauze from one of the saddlebags. The needle she passed through a candle flame before threading.

“Can you—hold it shut?” Felix’s other hand came up, thumb and forefinger on either side of his upper arm, pushing the edges of the wound closer. “Yes, like that.” 

So Felix pressed himself together as Ingrid sewed him up. The breath hissed out of him when the needle first punctured his skin, but he remained stubbornly silent while Ingrid worked, still unwilling to relinquish that ground to anybody, let alone Ingrid. A small, careful row of stitches winding up the line of his shoulder like a ladder. Annette would have been proud of her needlework. 

She tied the thread and bit it off. Her fingertips came away wet with his blood; she wiped them clean. From the roll of gauze she unwound a strip that seemed about long enough, and ripped it free.

“Did you love him,” Felix said.

The length of bandage slipped in Ingrid’s hands. She righted her grip, and, still facing away from him, said, “You don’t have the right to ask that of me.”

It didn’t matter which _him_ he meant. Felix might as well have been asking himself. Seeing in her a clumsy-hearted reflection of himself through distorted glass. They could have been alike, once. They could have grown to mirror each other, in close orbit around their king. Now they were barely able to look one another in the eye, shedding old loves the way a snake shed its skin. One by one, a gradual transformation of self: Glenn, then Dimitri, then Sylvain. 

If she turned to look back there they were, the lodestones of her childhood, orienting her magnetic north. A knight must be true, steady, just. Which of those could she still lay claim to? She turned to Felix and started wrapping the bandage around the gash. The first layer of gauze stained red almost instantly.

“I know,” he muttered. His head was turned away from her, a fine film of sweat glittering along the curve of his neck. And then, “I know you must wish it’d been me instead. In Duscur.”

“Don’t say that!” she said sharply. The wound had looked clean, none of the darkness of infection, but she wasn’t much of a healer. Maybe it was delirium brought on by fever. She reached towards his forehead to check his temperature, then thought better of it and snatched her hand back. “Are you out of your mind?”

“So you did love him,” he said.

She gritted her teeth. Forced her shoulders down. “I tried very hard,” she said, “to be like him. I think—that’s the surest kind of love I know.”

Felix’s face twisted. “You didn’t know what he was like. You and everyone else, you made him into this—into this untouchable ideal, this excuse to throw yourself on a blade and call it _loyalty_ —”

“That’s just like you,” Ingrid said, suddenly exhausted. Love for Felix, she knew, was inextricably bound up in resentment, and he just couldn’t imagine it any other way for anyone else. “You think your memory is the only one worth keeping. How I choose to remember Glenn—how I choose to honour that memory—is none of your business.”

“You’re wrong,” Felix said. “No memory is worth dying for.”

The silence that settled between them had the quality of spun sugar, the sort she’d glimpsed piled high atop elaborate cakes in a confectioner’s window, before the war. Brittle and sickly and sticky. 

Then she understood. Felix did not deserve her understanding, but they were long past the tallies of debts owing and debts owed. “This isn’t about Glenn, is it,” she said.

“Who says it isn’t.”

She wanted to set a hand over her eyes. She wanted to rest her forehead against the table and go to sleep for a thousand years. She wanted to throttle Felix. The last of these seemed particularly appealing.

“If you still want me to go,” she said, “you can just say so. Outright.”

“If I wanted you to go I _would_ say so. I’m not the type to hold back just to be _kind_.” He sneered. “But since you’ve made it so clear that’s what you hoped for from me—”

“That isn’t what—I didn’t even want you to be kind,” Ingrid said. “I only wanted you to be honest.”

Felix wanted to bury his history. Ingrid was a part of that history. How simple it was, in the end.

The crease between Felix’s brows deepened. He opened his mouth, shut it again. Finally, he said, low, “I didn’t want to see you hurt.”

This was such a non-sequitur it startled Ingrid out of her anger. “What?”

“You asked me before what I was thinking. That’s what. If it wasn’t me, it would have been you.”

Traitorously, her heartbeat stuttered. “Oh? So if I died, you’d be—what was the word you used back then?” Ingrid tapped her chin. “ _Annoyed?_ ” He glared at her. She glared back. “I can keep myself alive just fine.”

She expected him to toss something sharp back like he always did, but instead all he said was, “Good.” His eyes slipped shut. “At least that’s one promise I won’t break.” 

It took another two weeks for Felix’s shoulder to heal completely, maybe the longest period of injury recovery he’d ever undergone, what with all the mages they used to have around. He insisted firmly on maintaining their pace, but Ingrid insisted even more firmly on reining it back until he could at least lift his arm over his head without grimacing from pain. He was terrible at masking his expressions, so this was an easy metric to apply, especially as she was well-versed in the art of differentiating his scowls of discomfort from his regular scowls. This, too, was an extremely miserable realisation to have, but it wasn’t like she could help the knowledge. 

As per their current morning routine, she lifted Felix’s bandages to check on the wound, which Felix allowed since he couldn’t reach it himself. She’d taken out the stitches a week ago. The wound had receded into a tight pink line, the delicate shininess of new skin in a slash across his shoulder. 

“Looks fine,” she said briskly. “Congratulations. You’re all healed up.”

“Joy,” he said. She rolled her eyes.

The most pressing matter thus attended to, Ingrid turned her attention to quickly combing out her hair so she could put it up. It had begun to grow out, already past the line of her shoulders and a pain to braid, but she couldn’t bring herself to twist it into the loose plait she’d worn at the academy. She’d need to cut it again, soon. 

She was about to start sectioning out her hair when a hand came down on her shoulder. “Let me,” Felix said.

This was probably Felix’s way of thanking her. “Alright,” Ingrid said, and lowered her hands.

Felix gathered her hair up and began to braid with swift, sure movements, fingers light whenever they brushed against her head. He knew what he was doing. She wondered, briefly, who he’d learned this from. Annette, maybe, those characteristic open buns from their academy days, or more likely Petra, in the Black Eagles camp. It was a strange feeling, having Felix be the one to put her together, even if it was the simple act of reciprocation. 

“There,” he said, moving away. “Done.”

She ran the tips of her fingers along the sides of her head. The braid was neat and tight and close to the scalp, just the way she preferred. When she glanced up to meet Felix’s eyes there was a softness to them. As though they were two people who could find quiet comfort in each other’s presences. She couldn’t take any more of this. 

Ingrid stepped back, lifted Felix’s sword off the ground with her left hand, and tossed it to him. He caught it with an affronted look, probably protesting this treatment of his beloved blade. She drew her own sword, watching his fingers tighten around the hilt of his on reflex.

“Go on, then,” Ingrid said. “You want to train, I’m ready.”

They knew how to match blades without killing. They’d learned how to, in the academy, and even if that skill was rusty from lack of practice they were both good enough fighters to compensate. Besides, she didn’t want to kill Felix, not really. She was more certain of the fact that Felix did not want to kill her. 

Ingrid knocked Felix’s sword out of his hand. Then she dropped her own, for the sake of fairness. Hand-to-hand, they were more or less evenly matched. He caught her beneath the ribs; she swept his legs out from under him. She had him pinned; he flipped them over. She braced her legs and threw him off and he was underneath her again.

She bore down hard. Put all her weight behind the hold, restraining Felix against the ground, hands at his shoulders, one right over where the cut she’d bound in gauze had been, knees pushing into his sides. Underneath her, Felix went tense, shoulder muscles seizing up against her palms, and she readied herself for a throw, but then the strain flowed out of him with an abrupt deliberation that sent her head reeling. 

“Yield,” she said, though she hardly needed to. Furiously calm. “Felix—”

Felix said, “I yield.” 

A sore, sick hum rolled through her, like the onset of a fever, all of her body pulled too taut. Felix’s eyes were very dark. She drew out the thin, unnamed dagger she kept at her hip as a last resort and unsheathed it. She half-expected Felix to make some snide comment about the knightliness of striking an enemy when they were down, but he held his tongue. Maybe they were both tired of retreading the same ground. To think that even the two of them could find something to agree on. She felt punch-drunk, seasick. With the flat of the blade, she tapped his bare wrist, the inside of his elbow, the soft hollow of his throat, every place the skin was thinnest and blood ran closest to the surface. 

I could kill you, she thought. I could kill you, and you would let me.

She pushed herself off him and to her feet, stowing the dagger away. Her breath came in harsh and loud pants; she could feel her pulse in her ears. She stuck out a hand to help him up, blunt offer, and, amazingly, he took it. 

They stood facing each other. Sweat shone in Felix’s hair. Ingrid touched her braid, confirming with her fingers what she already knew: it hadn’t come loose.

She picked up her sword. He did the same.

“Again,” she said.

“Ingrid,” Felix said.

Ingrid opened her eyes. It made little difference to her field of vision; the curtained window and any moon it might have let in was on Felix’s side of the bed. She said flatly, “What.”

“Do you think,” he said, some strange note to his voice, and then stopped. Exhaled, frustration audible even in that small breath. “Do you wonder if things might have been different. If we’d stayed.”

The bottom of Ingrid’s stomach dropped out. _Now_ he wanted to talk about Dimitri? “What’s gotten into you?” she said, dismayed. “You’ve always been the loudest about leaving the past in the past. I left because I admired Lady Edelgard’s ideals, and I wanted to see them come to fruition, and I thought them worth pledging my service to, even if it meant—I don’t… I finished with regrets when I made that choice. No more regrets, for as long as I live.” 

Carefully, Ingrid did not roll over to look at Felix. In the dark it would have been impossible to discern his expression, anyway. I don’t regret coming with you because I cannot regret it, she thought. Because if I allow myself to regret it, then everything good and right still left to me that I turned my back on in order to stay by your side— 

“You’re right,” Felix said, in a stunning concession that nonetheless felt nothing like a victory. “It doesn’t matter. You and I, we don’t go back. We aren’t going back.”

They wouldn’t go back, because they had nothing to return to. “We aren’t going back,” Ingrid agreed. 

There was a touch to her shoulder. Felix’s hand, she thought, but the point of contact remained, so she corrected the awareness of him in her mind’s eye: Felix’s shoulder. Point to point, near to an acknowledgement. Curled up facing away from each other on the narrow bed, his back against hers, as though they were guarding one another. Some sense memory of a past battle stirred, one of the hundreds they’d fought together, entrusting their backs to one another in the way that only people with their history could manage. Like the overcrowded greenhouse plants Bernadetta fussed over back at the academy, they’d grown into each other despite everything, roots tangling into the same system.

But she’d made her choice. Not for her the clean break, or whatever passed for it when it came to this mire of childhood longing and grief. Everything capable of taking root in Galatea soil had to fight its way to the surface and Ingrid knew exactly what it meant to survive. The warmth of Felix’s shoulder pressed against hers was a bulwark, a structure to straighten a broken limb. This was all she had left. She drew in a steadying breath, hearing Felix do the same, and closed her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to let me know what you thought in the comments!! i'm on twitter [@ennezahard](https://twitter.com/ennezahard) and on tumblr [@delineative](https://delineative.tumblr.com)! you can find this fic on tumblr [here](https://delineative.tumblr.com/post/190261994285/fic-our-victory-well-sing-forever) <3


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